"–Reality is merely an illusion; albeit a very persistent one."

February 2, 2017February 2, 2017

UDN Notepad Remake

Well, some out there might know I am big fan of Unity no more…
Still, close friend of mine have requested more than once for me to revamp this little tool I’ve created 3 years ago, UDN Notepad; So then finally I went over there and did it for him.
It is basically a Unity plugin which adds built-in game design tools to the development environment, a tiny little design suite where developers can write their game’s story without leaving Unity Editor for other text processors that aren’t much game development centric. UDN is a little different because it forces the story writer to follow a programmer mindset from the get go, writers have to think about Game’s chapters, events, key events, dialogs and follow this pattern or else they simply go nowhere trying to write the story.
One good thing about Unity, when compared to other game engines, is that its Editor API is very small and never change too much; it took me less than half an hour to port the original code from Unity 3 to the actual Unity 5.5 although I did write this thing over 3 years ago and remember absolutely nothing about what I was doing when developing this plugin back then.

So now they can use UDN to write their little fantasy story and later quickly attach the resulting dialogs and chapter narratives to their Dialog System without much headaches while avoiding to pay for some commercial solutions like that Articy overpriced stuff yay!
For obvious reasons, UDN is capable of exporting all documents to RTF format which can then be opened on all the Windows, Linux or Mac platforms where you might have any text processor software capable of reading *.rtf files to distribute or print whenever needed.

Next step to help them a little more will be expanding this thing with hyperlink-able Character Database and Item Databases that may be converted to actual in-game objects, but that part is probably on them since my free time is always short, we shall see…